Despite extensive literature on political participation, little is known about the role of motivational psychology. This study examines whether Locus of Hope (LoH), a personality characteristic that captures individual differences in strategies for goal attainment, is a predictor of political engagement. LoH theory considers both individual variations on self-assessed efficacy for goal attainment (high versus low efficacy) and whether efficacy is characterized by an internal (self-actualized) or external (inter-reliant) sense of agency. Using a novel measure of political goals, we examine the relationship between LoH and political engagement with a demographically representative sample of 784 Canadians. LoH and goal attainment were found to predict political engagement over and above measures of political efficacy and interest. The findings open new avenues of research that can help us better understand why and how some people engage in politics.

The sharpness of various Hardy-type inequalities is well-understood in the reversible Finsler setting; while infinite reversibility implies the failure of these functional inequalities, cf. Kristály et al. [Trans. Am. Math. Soc., 2020]. However, in the remaining case of irreversible manifolds with finite reversibility, there is no evidence on the sharpness of Hardy-type inequalities. In fact, we are not aware of any particular examples where the sharpness persists. In this paper, we present two such examples involving two celebrated inequalities: the classical/weighted Hardy inequality (assuming non-positive flag curvature) and the McKean-type spectral gap estimate (assuming strong negative flag curvature). In both cases, we provide a family of Finsler metric measure manifolds on which these inequalities are sharp. We also establish some sufficient conditions, which guarantee the sharpness of more involved Hardy-type inequalities on these spaces. Our relevant technical tool is a Finslerian extension of the method of Riccati pairs (for proving Hardy inequalities), which also inspires the main ideas of our constructions.

This paper discusses ways in which the Kantian account of private law might be more capacious than some of its critics believe it to be, and identifies more precisely the reasons that Kant’s system excludes from bearing on private rights. The development of Weinrib’s conception of private law in Reciprocal Freedom clarifies that certain policy reasons, along with some reasons that bear asymmetrically on the right-bearer and duty-holder, can still play a role in a Kantian account of private law. This follows from the sequential nature of the Kantian argument and, in particular, from the three ways in which the normativity of the first stage bears on the normativity within the civil condition. With that in place, it is possible to identify more precisely the types of reasons that cannot be brought into the Kantian fold and, consequently, to gain clarity on the argumentative burdens that Kantians need to discharge.

One Health has primarily focused on infectious diseases, without adequately considering the nuances of the environment or biocultural diversity. Its focus has predominantly been on the scientific perspective without taking into account the locally generated Indigenous knowledge or local concerns and consequences of measures adopted in terms of biosecurity and bio-monitoring and their acceptance by the communities concerned. With the recent global policy developments including the One Health High-Level Expert Panel (OHHLEP) and the pandemic it appears to have become more broader in scope and more inclusive, yet it continues to face multiple implementation challenges. Drawing on a set of case studies from different regions this paper seeks to explore the multiple in One Health. It explores how we can better integrate the practical experience of local communities into the One Health approach and how anthropology as a learning approach can contribute to this. By citing specific case studies, the article argues for reckoning the co-created, even shared knowledge of different life forms, within an ecosystem and their dynamic nature. It argues that knowledge networking is crucial to bring out all the available knowledge, and to make it visible and shareable with each other while retaining their own logic and epistemology. Finally, the article points out that there is no one size fits all approach to One Health; it should be co-planned based on contextual realities.

The founding of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) is often interpreted as a top-down transmission of Bolshevik ideology. This article challenges that view by asking: how did individuals with divergent ideological backgrounds – anarchists, socialists, and Bolsheviks – coalesce into a centralized political organization? Rather than emphasizing ideological convergence, it foregrounds the role of interpersonal networks and organizational capacity in early party-building. Focusing on the activist network around the Zhejiang Provincial First Normal School in Hangzhou (Hangzhou First Normal School, HFNS), the article reveals how provincial actors with prior organizing experience helped translate competing doctrines into coordinated revolutionary practice. HFNS-affiliated figures brought anarchist-socialist traditions to Shanghai, played key roles in the Weekly Review editorial board, and built ties with both Chinese and Russian Marxists. Drawing on archival materials from police records, newspapers, and personal writings, the article reconstructs HFNS’s cross-regional impact and strategic contributions to the early CCP organization. It argues that the CCP’s foundation was less a product of ideological clarity than of social trust and regional mobilization. By centering the HFNS network, the article contributes to a growing body of scholarship that seeks to provincialize CCP origins and foreground the hybrid, contested nature of revolutionary subjectivity in modern China.

This article discusses the family language biographies of two Spanish-Catalan speaking, white middle-class mothers living in Catalonia, who raise their children in English. The rationale behind their choice is informed by the mothers’ experiences when trying to learn English as young adults in the late 1980s, mediated by their present socioeconomic conditions. In order to lay the groundwork for what is framed as a ‘good’ future for their children, these mothers embark upon a course of action designed to expose their children to English. The analysis, drawing upon a language biography approach and social positioning, reveals the role of parents’ pasts for the construction of the future. Beyond the widely understood tropes regarding the commodification of English within neoliberalism, the families’ actions reveal ideologies and future orientations informed by a complex interplay of historical, political, and economic factors wherein speaking English has become one of the markers of social access. (Family language biographies, Catalan children raised in English, anticipation, futurity)

We consider the random series–parallel graph introduced by Hambly and Jordan (2004 Adv. Appl. Probab. 36, 824–838), which is a hierarchical graph with a parameter $p\in [0, \, 1]$. The graph is built recursively: at each step, every edge in the graph is either replaced with probability p by a series of two edges, or with probability $1-p$ by two parallel edges, and the replacements are independent of each other and of everything up to then. At the nth step of the recursive procedure, the distance between the extremal points on the graph is denoted by $D_n (p)$. It is known that $D_n(p)$ possesses a phase transition at $p=p_c \;:\!=\;\frac{1}{2}$; more precisely, $\frac{1}{n}\log {{\mathbb{E}}}[D_n(p)] \to \alpha(p)$ when $n \to \infty$, with $\alpha(p) >0$ for $p>p_c$ and $\alpha(p)=0$ for $p\le p_c$. We study the exponent $\alpha(p)$ in the slightly supercritical regime $p=p_c+\varepsilon$. Our main result says that as $\varepsilon\to 0^+$, $\alpha(p_c+\varepsilon)$ behaves like $\sqrt{\zeta(2) \, \varepsilon}$, where $\zeta(2) \;:\!=\; \frac{\pi^2}{6}$.

The relationship between populist attitudes and ideological orientations remains an area of considerable academic interest, yet much is still unknown about the ideological inclinations associated with populist attitudes. While many scholars acknowledge the link between populist attitudes and political ideology, existing studies often treat this relationship as either a given or a peripheral concern. This paper represents an initial exploration into the association between populist attitudes and political ideology. Utilizing data from the fifth wave (2016–2021) of the Comparative Study of Electoral Systems, which encompasses 43 countries and 52 elections, this study aims to uncover how this relationship manifests cross-nationally. By employing a variety of rigorous methodological models, including the Generalized Additive Model, our results reveal a nonlinear relationship between populist attitudes and political ideology. Specifically, we find that political ideology and populist attitudes exhibit a U-shaped nonlinear relationship and that ideological extremism and populist attitudes demonstrate an exponential nonlinear relationship. These findings emphasize the nuanced interplay between ideological positions and populist attitudes, providing a deeper understanding of how they intersect.

In this paper, we study ordering properties of vectors of order statistics and sample ranges arising from bivariate Pareto random variables. Assume that $(X_1,X_2)\sim\mathcal{BP}(\alpha,\lambda_1,\lambda_2)$ and $(Y_1,Y_2)\sim\mathcal{BP}(\alpha,\mu_1,\mu_2).$ We then show that $(\lambda_1,\lambda_2)\stackrel{m}{\succ}(\mu_1,\mu_2)$ implies $(X_{1:2},X_{2:2})\ge_{st}(Y_{1:2},Y_{2:2}).$ Under bivariate Pareto distributions, we prove that the reciprocal majorization order between the two vectors of parameters is equivalent to the hazard rate and usual stochastic orders between sample ranges. We also show that the weak majorization order between two vectors of parameters is equivalent to the likelihood ratio and reversed hazard rate orders between sample ranges.

The concept of ethnicity has been largely omitted from recent interpretational models in European prehistoric archaeology. However, eagerness to avoid the problems associated with its past uses has left us with difficulties in talking about important aspects of collective identities in the past. This has become particularly clear as increasing attention has turned to understanding processes of migration and their underlying social dynamics. Here, we argue that a concept of ethnicity cast along the lines of Rogers Brubaker’s ‘ethnicity without groups’ provides us with a possibility to avoid the conceptual baggage of essentialist and static views of ethnic identities. Instead, it stresses the dynamic nature of collective identities and the social and political use of ethnicity. This is especially useful, we argue, for the study of prehistory and in periods of profound change, such as situations of migration. We use the historical Migration Period as a foil to discuss the Early Neolithic Linearbandkeramik and the third millennium B.C. Corded Ware and Bell Beaker phenomena to demonstrate how group-making and ethnicity formed and were transformed during migration processes.

Impending doom. Fire, drought, floods. This is the image of the environmental future our young people are shown and often set the challenged of “What are you going to do about it.” This is an enormous quest. It is directionless ambition without structure. It is the illusion of agency for change. This article showcases the design decisions of curricula and reflections on using of range of cli-fi and concludes with a set of continua that may help fellow educators in developing cl-fi learning activities including storytelling cards, design sprints, and sci-fi prototyping. They are iterations in the reflective approach to creating experiences that envision positive outcomes. These activities draw on research from the Australian Research Council Centre of Excellence for Plants for Space (P4S), which explores sustainable agriculture in extreme environments, like lunar habitats. P4S operates at the intersection of plants, people, technology, and sustainability, fostering critical and creative thinking. By framing sustainable futures in space context, we aim to alleviate environmental anxiety, encourages optimistic, innovative thinking, unconstrained by biological and societal norms. Climate fiction becomes a tool for imagining and realising new technologies, enabling students to create and critique possibilities beyond Earth’s current limitations.

Pascal stressed the importance of ‘reasons of the heart’ in leading us to God, and insisted that the God to whom he turned during his ‘night of fire’ on 23 November 1654 was ‘not the God of the philosophers and scholars’, but the God of the patriarchs and of Jesus Christ. This suggests a very different approach from that of Thomas, who characterises God in seemingly abstract terms, such as ‘being itself’ and ‘goodness itself’. This paper first explores the methodological and epistemological lessons to be drawn from Pascal’s notion of ‘reasons of the heart’ and argues that we have good reason to take them seriously. The second half of the paper discusses Aquinas’s apparently more impersonal conception of the deity, as an ‘infinite ocean of substance’ (John of Damascus) on which all things depend. But it then explores Aquinas’s account of the passage in Exodus where God addresses Moses in personal terms, and argues that this account, together with what Aquinas has to say on the subject of prayer, indicates that the God of his philosophical deliberations can indeed be reconciled with the intensely personal God of Scripture to whom Pascal turned during his night of fire.

Innovations in deliberative and participatory democracy have been rapidly adopted by policy makers. Long-term success of democratic reform hinges on developing research through open, reproducible, and ethical standards that secure trust in findings. This study examines how Democratic Innovations (DI) scholars implement open science practices (OSP). We analyze empirical research published in English-language peer-reviewed journals between 1970 and 2021. Our analysis reveals limited OSP use: less than 1% of research articles involve replication and approximately 3.5% provide full data access, despite an increase in the past decade to almost 8% of articles published in 2020. Open publishing has increased, reaching almost 50% of publications in recent years. The article concludes by discussing how OSP can contribute to improving the practice of DI and the policy effects of institutional design. Researchers who understand institutional design for inclusive collective action are best placed to make the changes required to promote open science.

The thought that intellectual arrogance consists in, roughly, overconfident resilience in one’s beliefs has been influential in philosophy and psychology. This thought is in the background of much of the philosophical literature on disagreement as well as some leading psychological scales of intellectual humility. It is not true, however. This paper highlights cases (of “stubborn fools” and the “arrogantly open-minded”) that cause trouble for equating intellectual arrogance with overconfident belief resilience. These cases are much better accommodated if we see intellectual arrogance as, instead, a form of vicious intellectual distraction by the ego.

We construct universal G-zips on good reductions of the Pappas-Rapoport splitting models for PEL-type Shimura varieties. We study the induced Ekedahl-Oort stratification, which sheds new light on the mod p geometry of splitting models. Building on the work of Lan on arithmetic compactifications of splitting models, we further extend these constructions to smooth toroidal compactifications. Combined with the work of Goldring-Koskivirta on group theoretical Hasse invariants, we get an application to Galois representations associated to torsion classes in coherent cohomology in the ramified setting.

Edward MacDowell held a liminal position in the late nineteenth century, well-known and active in Europe but also championed as a leading figure of US musical identity. In the first concert of his 1887 American Festival, conductor Frank Van der Stucken programmed MacDowell’s Hamlet, positioning MacDowell and his composition as important components of American music. However, MacDowell’s symphonic poem holds layers of cultural meaning in its various associations with European artistic, dramatic and musical figures.

MacDowell composed Hamlet. Ophelia. Zwei Gedichte für grosses Orchester in Frankfurt in 1884, shortly after he and his wife returned from their honeymoon in London, a city imbued with cultural Wagnerism. The style and motivic material of MacDowell’s symphonic poem are reminiscent of Wagner’s Tristan und Isolde, suggesting an aesthetic and thematic connection. Furthermore, MacDowell dedicated his composition to the famous Shakespearean actors, Henry Irving and Ellen Terry, indicating their impact on his work.

These rich cultural layers of MacDowell’s Hamlet implicate issues of national identity and aesthetic value, issues that clarify the competing positions of the composer: as a nuanced cosmopolitan composer exhibiting English, French and Germanic elements in his work; as a US composer valorized to promote national identity; and as a proponent of aesthetic value transcending national origin. This article explores each cultural layer of MacDowell’s Hamlet and Ophelia to position the symphonic poem as a microcosm of the rich cultural landscape of the United States at the close of the nineteenth century.